It ain't like it used to be

Originally published June 27, 2017

Why is it the smell of freshly cut grass always takes us back to our childhood? Because our dads MADE US CUT THE GRASS. Isabel will have no memory associated with freshly cut grass. Nor will most kids today. They're not made to cut the grass, or they can't, because they're too busy on Saturday morning going to this lesson, or that game, or a sports tournament two states away. Besides, the landscaping service cuts the lawn now. Have you tried to find a teenager who will cut your yard for $20? You can't. Because A) $20 is not nearly enough to compensate them for their precious time and B) they (and their parents) are traveling to the next sporting event. And for that matter, do you even see kids outside playing? Ever? Sewanee is likely one of the last places on the planet where you can let your kids roam around - without shoes on, even (I never saw a Thomas child with clean feet). Our friends who graduated and left this year were lamenting moves to big cities, where their children - who would not understand why, because they started childhood in Sewanee - would not be allowed to roam the neighborhood unsupervised. Outside play is tightly controlled, either at a park, or the morning's sporting event. Birthday parties aren't even outside anymore; they're in venues for crying out loud. Since when did we, children who were raised at parties on picnic tables in the backyard, decide that our children needed to have parties at locations and then give gifts to our guests? What in the world is going on?

I have to talk a lot about this picture. My mom will be horrified, and for that, I am sorry. But it is the absolute iconic picture of my childhood. We call it the "mailbox" picture, because my mom, in the chartreuse pants, has, well, a letter in her mailbox, if you see what I mean. Anyway, that's not what makes it iconic, except for the color of her pants. This is my fifth birthday party, which puts it smack in the middle of the 1970s. 1974. That's me on the left, running around the circle. Gina Rossi is sitting on the bench in the background; she's a lawyer now. The twins on the right with the blonde hair are Scott and David Hartle, who lived down the street from us for all of our childhood; they're Hollywood producers now. Parmalee Price is one of the dark-headed girls; she moved away when I was little, and Kristen Hiller is likely another; she was in Karl's class. Karl is on the other side of mom. I'm drawing a blank on the other two kids. Maybe my mom will remember. This is a 1974 birthday party. There are no rented horses, clowns, blowups or carousel rides. Just us, a picnic table and a stick in the ground with some balloons taped to it. We didn't even have helium. The air in those balloons probably came from my dad's lungs, not a rented cylinder. We're playing a game that involved running, strategy and physical contact with another person. Oh, and that's my backyard. With grass soon to mowed every Saturday by my brother (for $5). The little girls all have a dress on, with bobby socks and Mary Janes. The boys' shirts are tucked in to their pants and shorts. Everyone is standing compliantly in place, waiting patiently on their turn in this game we're playing together. There are no other parents there. I don't remember the cake, but it was likely store-bought. Because that was the only time we ever had a bakery cake. Mom and I always made cakes, from scratch, for Sunday dinner. So scratch-made cakes were no big deal. But a store-bought cake, with your name piped on it, and maybe a plastic ballerina pirouetting out of the middle, was a big deal. That's what made a birthday a birthday. But this wasn't just a birthday in our neighborhood, this was everyday. Every day we were outside, running around. We lived on a circle, which was really neat. It was its own park, with boundaries and friends' homes, and even bamboo-land at the end of the cul-de-sac. We all knew it was dinner time when the Hartles rang the dinner bell. Yes, they had a dinner bell on their front stoop. When it was time, Mr. Hartle gave it a jangle, and we all knew to head home. We played four-square in our driveway, and roller skated on the Hartle's driveway, because it was smooth concrete. When the Moore boys (there were 4 of them) moved in next door, their dad built them a tree house. Many adventures were had there. There was a creek behind Will Laye's house that the boys played in, while I sometimes retreated to more girly things at Kelly Walls' house, or for many years at my best childhood friend Leslie Muzzy's house. We played games of imagination and music, because there weren't TVs in every room. And the one TV in the den was definitely under the purview of whatever adult was present. Mrs. Muzzy always watched soap operas in the afternoon (and she was not disturbed but for great peril), and our TV wasn't allowed on until 8 p.m., when the sitcoms came on, or on the weekend, when we watched Love Boat, Fantasy Island and Starsky and Hutch. Around the time the picture was taken, S.W.A.T. was on. One of the early cop shows, I remember how good looking at the men were. What a lineup.

Left, Very early 70s. TV is on the TV cart so we could swing it into the kitchen on Saturday and watch cartoons while we ate pancakes. Because in the 70s, cartoons only came on Saturday morning. There weren't entire channels dedicated to them.

Sometimes we'd have to use a house phone to call home, or call a friend to ask permission to play. Our number was 579-2843. I had to memorize that, and all my friends' numbers. You knew where someone lived, actually, by the first three digits of their phone number. You could almost drill it down to the neighborhood, or at least to the side of town. We didn't have phones that would remember them for you; honestly, I couldn't dial Isabel's number if I had to. And a phone number today, despite its area code, doesn't in any way indicate where that person is calling from. We only had two phones, as did most of our friends. And they were both land-locked, of course. One beside the bed in my parent's room, for middle of the night emergencies that never occurred, and one in the kitchen, that, to talk for any length of time, you dragged a kitchen chair over and had a seat. I didn't drag a chair often though, because we weren't allowed to talk for hours on the phone. After 5 minutes, my dad would yell "DING DONG", which meant, get off the phone, someone might be trying to reach us and calling long distance. No one called long distance during the day, though, because weekend and evening rates were cheaper; everyone knew that. Dad's 5-minute policy became a hindrance in junior high, when boys started calling. Ugh. Some of you may remember when numbers were only four digits, or when you had to ask the operator to connect you. A lot certainly changed in the 20th century, and then technology began to move like wildfire through the Tennessee mountains in the 21st century. We can hardly keep up. Michael is working in a small church in a place called Alto, which is down the mountain from us, on the outskirts of a place called Roark's Cove. The cove is closest to the base of the mountain, and Alto is the first incorporated area next to it. As soon as the mountain levels out into the valley, fields are plowed, and corn, potatoes, cotton and soybeans are planted, and cattle are grazed. The church, Christ Church Alto, is small, with an average Sunday attendance of 10, but has had a presence in the area since the 1920s. Before that, there was a church built in the cove in 1877, and was said to be so old that the oak tree that leaned on it was actually holding it up. Seminarians tended to those churches, too, and have had a great impact on the curation of the Holy Spirit in the area. In the 1920s there were two Episcopal churches in that cove, Christ Church Alto and Calvary Episcopal, with 30-40 members attending each church, usually divided among a handful of families. People also produced more kids back then. Seminarians and dedicated priests tended not only to the church, but to the families. Father Butt, who was there as a seminarian, and then again in the 1940s, visited every family in the four parishes he tended. "You couldn't throw out your dishwater without running into Father Butt," historian Betty Lou Rose said was once said about his omnipresence in the lives of his congregants. Betty Lou, whose age hovers in the 90s, has attended Christ Church and Calvary all her life. Life in the cove changed after the War (that's WWII), when factories moved from producing guns and weapons of war to machines that worked the land much more efficiently than a man behind a horse and a plow could. Farms now comprised thousands of acres, instead of one or two, which was all a family could manage. So the families who once lived in the coves move north, to Ohio and beyond, to work in those factories. The land is still farmed in Roark's Cove, but the farmers who do it no longer live here. To get to church, we drive down the mountain the seminarians used to walk down. They really did walk two miles in the snow to do their work. They depended on the kindness of those who lived in the cove to feed them dinner and house them overnight. Today, Betty Lou doesn't even know her neighbors. She can remember the house where she could always get a cookie, and which house had the sweetest spring water, though. But those houses and those families no longer exist. War, industry and technology changed the cove a long time ago. I wonder what will change for Isabel, and I wonder what she'll remember fondly as part of her new millennium childhood. She's had her own phone since about third grade, but her birthday parties were held at home. She is the product of divorced parents, which has always put her between two homes, living by different rules at each house. She keeps her room clean, but has not been made to do chores. She loves to make chocolate chip cookies and cupcakes, but eschews dishwashing. Netflix is probably her favorite source of entertainment, but since coming to Tennessee, she plays three sports (two inside and one outside). Her attention span is short, but she is a dedicated friend.

All these kids have changed, and are much taller now. Isabel and Madison Turcotte are rising seniors; Gabe Hannon is a rising junior; their Hannon cousin, Emma Kate, and Noah Hannon just graduated high school, and Alex Dow, on the end, is a rising 9th grader. Their moms, Gina, Inez and Amanda and I worked together at the hospital for a while. We're still friends, and keep up with each other's children as if they're our own. This was a birthday party at Furman. they played on the amphitheater stage. Isabel was very girly when she was little. Thus, the princess costume.

Change is good. I'm not lamenting change. I enjoy googling things. I feel like I know so much more. I love taking pictures with my phone, and keeping up with friends (like the Hartle twins) on Facebook. I'm glad Isabel has a phone with her so I can know when she's made it through Atlanta on the way home to Greenville. But I also miss lazy Saturdays, and clean, corny television shows. I bake my own cakes, still, and I'm glad Isabel knows how to make a chocolate chip cookie. God promises change - eschatological change, that is. ...In a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. 1 Corinthians 15:52 That kind of change is hard for some of us to understand, or even to reconcile, because we don't know exactly what kind of change it will be. Nor did we know what kind of change Google would bring to our lives. Not that I'm comparing Google to everlasting life, but to the change that occurs that we don't even realize until looking back. Some memories are nostalgic - like the smell of that grass, but it also doesn't stop our generation from scheduling the landscaper as we load our kids up to head to the next sporting tournament. We have graciously accepted not having to spend Saturday morning doing chores, instead providing enriching experiences for our kids. I know that God is preparing an enriching experience for me, and that I may even be living in it now. My life has changed, from a bustling city to a rural mountain top, an experience I wouldn't change for the world.